THE HOUSE OF COMFORT AND CONNECTION; MODERNITY AND POSTNATAL DEPRESSION IN SOUTHWARK

:I began this project by interrogating the modernist film Red Desert. This film is set in Italy and directed by Michelangelo Antonioni. Amid Italy's modern wastelands and toxic factories, wife and mother Giuliana desperately tries to conceal her tenuous grip on reality from those around her. I found myself attached to this storyline as it reflected my own experience with postnatal mental health. Simultaneously healing my trauma and exploring Giuliana’s anxieties, I interrogated the film through textiles – creating tactile surfaces representing emotional decay and the modernist landscape. Taking a different approach to architecture led me to conclude that materiality has the most considerable influence on mothers' emotional connections. Manifesting in a hybrid proposal, I intended to intersect the cruelty of modernism with soft, tactile landscape maquettes. These interventions began with comfort lines, detailing places that should be made soft for user comfort and quickly spanned into full-scale interventions to provide retreat within complex, unfriendly landscapes. The most crucial is the inclusion of soft felted materials into window frames – expanding internally and externally as beacons of hope for mothers battling postnatal mental health. Wall details have also been intersected with comfort to emphasise the infectious nature of modern angst.